College Textbook Rentals get Big at Colleges around the Country

College tuition fees have never been higher. But the pain for parents and students doesn't end there. Buying the textbooks needed for one year at college can easily total $1200 - just a little bit more to help add to the burden. That's where college textbook rentals come in.

If you think about it, college students happen to be such a great captive market for the textbook sellers. Any time a professor prescribes a certain textbook, the entire class has no choice but to go out and get a copy. There never was a more angry captive market than the college students we have today. All of that could go away with a bunch of great new services that have come up, offering college textbook rentals - services with names like Chegg and CourseSmart - in addition to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Renting textbooks, you can usually save 75% off the cost of what it would take it by textbook outright. But these are e-books that they rent out. If you want the real thing, the National Association of College Stores says that just about every college bookstore this year is ready to enter the college textbook rentals business.

Students have always been able to sign up for some kind of buyback program where they buy new textbooks at the beginning of the semester, paying the full $150 or whatever for it; they get to sell it back to the college bookstore or wherever for $5 at the end of the semester. It tends to not be quite satisfying. On Amazon, the typical college textbook sells for about $200. If you went for the e-book edition to keep, you’d pay $100 for it. If you just wanted to rent the e-book version, you'd just have to pay about $50. That's a great saving.

College textbook rentals aren't for everyone though. The rental programs tend to only keep titles that have mass-market appeal. If your professor happens to prescribe a kind obscure title, renting won't be an option. The rental companies have a reason for doing this, of course. Any time they buy a book to rent it out, they can only do it once per semester. To make a profit on a book, they need to be able to rent it out at least four times. They couldn't be sure of being able to do so if they went and got obscure titles.

Sometimes, renting isn't even the smart choice to make. For instance, what if you have a textbook that you needed the whole year through and not just over the single semester? You might as well go and buy a new textbook for what you would spend on rent. And anyway, a much cheaper option you're likely to have, going to a used books site like Half.com

If you do decide to go with college textbook rentals, you should probably choose paper over e-book. You're likely to save more money.

Does it make Sense Investing in Adult Degrees after 50

With the government seemingly having given up on the jobless, there's one thing people have realized today - it's completely up to them to look out for their interests. A very popular way today that older adults in their 50s or 60s choose, to look competitive in the job market once again, is to head back to college for a new degree in the area of work they are interested in. But of course, we all know that tuition costs are astronomical everywhere. People in good jobs aren't able to scrape together enough to put a son or daughter through college. Do older adult degrees really make much sense spending thousands on? Does a person at 50 getting a degree really help his career prospects any?

One reason so many people think of applying to get older adult degrees is that for hundreds of colleges across the country, the older adult market can be a pretty profitable source of students, and they advertise. People out of jobs or people scraping by in low-paying jobs seemingly with no hope of ever stepping back into the middle class again, when they look at these advertisements for programs specifically designed for them, think it could be worth a try getting new qualifications to put on their resume. Colleges are seeing a 20% rise in the number of applications they get from people over 50.

The American Association of Community Colleges has a Plus 50 initiative in place in dozens of campuses across the country to offer adult degrees specifically aimed at baby-boomers. The University of California has degree programs aimed specifically at boomers too.

But getting down to the nitty-gritty, is it worth it spending about $750 for each class you take at a public college or spending  four times that amount in private college? By the time you get a bachelor's degree one of these places, you end up spending $30,000. Even joining a continuing education program can work out to be pretty expensive - an accounting certificate for instance will set you back about $4500. A Master's degree can set you back $50,000 each year.

Experts are of the opinion that it could be a good idea spending money on getting adult degrees or other qualifications in your 50s or 60s if you have hard figures that tell you that you can expect the job you get with your new degree to pay at least as much starting out as you have to borrow to pay for the degree. You also need to consider how much longer you expect to stay on the job market. If you plan to be working for another 10 years, this could be well worth it.

If you are a senior citizen, many community colleges allow you to take classes for free. If you have a job already, you could probably ask your employer if they offer tuition assistance. Whatever you do spend out of hand, you could probably get a tax deduction for as well.

Making the College Degree Universal - like High School

It's taken for granted now that every child born in this country has to at least go as far as high school. It wasn't always this way though. When the government made a high school education universal more than 90 years ago, it seemed to the entire country that the government was being far too idealistic. What would everyone do with such a fantastic level of education, they wondered. Most people just needed to work the fields or the factories. Why, in Europe, a universal high school education policy was positively discouraged by the intellectuals of the continent. America went ahead with making it illegal for parents to keep their children home from school, and brought schooling to every home in every village in the land. Europe did not at first. As the years wore on, it became clear that America's high school graduates certainly made for better factory workers and farmhands. It took the country forward much more quickly to have an educated population. Sadly though, America seems to have forgotten the lessons it once learned. You can hear it debated everywhere today how it's just craziness that we expect every young person to go to college.

With parents groaning under the burden of expensive college tuitions and many young people everywhere unwilling to put themselves through rigor that a college degree requires, pandering education skeptics seem to have the public ear.  Unfortunately for them, being the country of modest educational expectations makes no more sense today than it did back then.

One reason it is argued that a college degree is unnecessary is that it seems apparent these days that being a college graduate is nothing special. Young people don't seem to get any great jobs just because they have a degree under their belts, they say.

Now this would be a terribly simplistic argument to make. While a college degree doesn't guarantee anything more than a mediocre life, not having one would in most circumstances, guarantee a terrible one. To begin with, better educated people are certainly better adjusted in life - and happier. And then, holding a bachelor's degree can pay off in all kinds of ways in life. Even if one’s job is being a salesperson, a plumber, a carpenter, a car mechanic or a secretary.

One needs to realize that if college were nearly free like it is in, say, Germany, no one would be interested in this argument. The only reason we talk about this in America is that college costs and the loans taken out to handle them, can be crippling.

All this anxiety over unmanageable college costs though doesn't always make sense. At your average public college, a standard degree is only about $2000 a year. It's the private colleges that charge high prices. And when you graduate from college, your pay scale is certainly going to be higher - by 50% usually. When there's a recession, far fewer college graduates lose their jobs than high school graduates.

The biggest surprise in this test, which was done by a team at Georgetown University, was the one that went on to find that people who come to blue-collar jobs with degrees routinely make far more than people who come to the job with nothing more than high school. With education, a plumber can usually do more skilled plumbing work; and the same would apply to a policeman, a secretary or anyone.

Jobs You Can Get With a Music Degree

When I was in high school, I was always told that one of the worst majors a person could choose was in music, because all one could do with a music degree was teach music in school. That is not entirely true. I can attest to the fact, as many of my friends were music majors in college, that there are several different professions where a music degree can be utilized.

One of my friends said he wanted to teach, but not at school, and he certainly did not want to be a band director. He did not feel there was anything wrong with that, necessarily, but he felt that his music degree could be put to better use than trying to spread his knowledge out to 80 or 100 students. He always told me applauded those who could, but he wanted to work with young people on a more individual basis, so he became a different kind of teacher - a tutor.

He used his music degree and all the credentials he had developed to offer private lessons on the piano. He has done this for the last 20 years and makes a very handsome living doing so. I asked him one time if it has ever been hard for him to constantly do the same thing, and he assured me it was not. He said he loved watching children learn and said he never felt like he was working a real job. He could not imagine doing anything different and has built a nest egg for himself so large that he will be able to retire at the age of 55 and live quite comfortably for the rest of his life, if he so chooses.

Another friend of mine who has a music degree plays guitar, and out of college, he started picking up gigs. He loves jazz and blues, so he decided to move down to New Orleans and try to make a living there. He hooked up with some local musical acts and eventually built up a reputation for being a pretty good guitar player. He once told me that he could work every night of the week if he chose to do so, and he lives in a very nice apartment in the French Quarter.

Yet another friend of mine is a violinist. She got her music degree with the specific goal of joining a symphony orchestra, which she did within five years of graduating. With hard work, she moved up the line to become concert mistress, and said she spends her entire day doing what she loves to do most - playing and creating music.

These are just a few of the options for people with a music degree. I have always loved stories of people who disproved a negative stereotype, and all three of my friends have certainly done so!